VietNamNet would like to introduce a series of article about the presidential election in the US, by G. Calvin Mackenzie, the Goldfarb Family Distinguished Professor of Government at Colby College in the USA and currently a Fulbright scholar in Vietnam.

In the flow of an American presidential campaign, there are four seasons.  First come the winter and spring primary elections where the parties choose their nominees.  Those are followed now by the summer lull when the candidates are out in pursuit of votes but many Americans aren’t paying much attention.  The end of the summer brings the  national conventions where the parties choose their nominees.  Then in autumn the general election occurs.

But wait a minute.  Didn’t I just say that there are two seasons where the parties choose their nominees?  I did, and this is yet another of the peculiarities of American politics.

This week Republican delegations from every state are convening in Tampa, Florida to choose their party’s candidates for president and vice president.  We already know, of course, that those two candidates will be Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.  Romney won enough delegates in the Republican primary elections last spring to ensure his nomination.  Two weeks ago, he announced that Paul Ryan would be his running mate.  So there is no suspense about who will be nominated in Tampa.  Their selection will be just a formality.

It wasn’t always so.  Conventions used to be the centerpiece of the nominating process, a place where real battles were fought and difficult choices were made.  A little history will help explain how that came about--and how it ended.

The gentlemen who wrote the American Constitution spent a lot of time arguing about how a president would be chosen from among the candidates for that office.  But they provided no guidance as to how one would become one of those candidates.  They seem to have thought that somehow candidates would emerge from each region of the country, and they created several processes for sorting them out in a national election.  They had nothing to say about political parties because no parties existed when the Constitution was written in 1787.

By 1800, natural divisions of opinion had begun to emerge among the political class, and politicians began to form alliances which soon evolved into political parties with names likes Federalists and Anti-Masons.  When that happened, the members of Congress from each of these fledgling parties took it upon themselves to get together and select a presidential candidate to represent their party in the general election.  Historians now call this the “congressional caucus” system of nomination.

But that system only lasted a few decades.  Most Americans couldn’t participate and often did not like the candidates chosen by the caucus.  Pressure began to build for a more representative nominating process.  
By the 1830s a new nominating process emerged, one built around national party conventions.  The rapid spread of railroads across the country made it possible for delegates from every state to gather in one city a few months before the election to debate a “platform” of policy preferences and choose their party’s nominee.  

From the 1830s to the 1960s, these conventions were places where party leaders in each state—often called “party bosses”—gathered with the delegations they had chosen themselves and whose members would vote the way the boss directed.  The bosses often differed over who should be the nominee, and there was frequently a lot of bargaining and dealing, and many ballots, before one candidate achieved a sufficient majority.  In 1924, for example, the Democrats needed 103 ballots and 15 days to choose their nominee—who eventually lost badly to Republican Calvin Coolidge in the fall election.

This all changed quickly after 1968 when the Democratic Party reformed its rules to require that most of the delegates at its conventions be chosen by a popular election, not a party boss.  The bosses soon lost power and primary elections became the focal point of the nominating process.  At no convention of either party after 1968 was there any suspense about whom the nominee would be.  That decision had already been made in the primary elections.

So now the conventions have become little more than big celebrations, a chance for the party to coalesce around its nominee and try to create a positive—and winning—image as it prepares for the general election campaign.  A modern party convention is essentially a television program, controlled by party leaders and designed to make one party’s candidate look very good and the other’s very bad.

But as the conventions have become less suspenseful, so have they become less interesting to average Americans.  The major television networks barely cover them now, and the viewing audience is greatly reduced from what it was when the conventions were public displays of raw politics.

As the Republicans gather this week and the Democrats next, they will try to make their best sales pitch to the American people.   But will anyone be watching?  

G. Calvin Mackenzie